Posted
by
Roblimo
on Friday October 16, 2015 @02:18PM
from the open-the-door-and-let-me-in dept.

Do you read OpenSource.com? If you're interested in Linux or Open Source, perhaps you should. Our interview guest today, Rikki Endsley, is an editor and community manager there. She says that while Red Hat is the site's sponsor, they never try to dictate the site's content. And even if you don't want to read another website (although OpenSource.com is a mighty good one), maybe you can make your way to the All Things Open conference October 19 and 20 in Raleigh.

Or you might want to submit an article proposal to OpenSource.com. They don't pay in money, but it's a prestigious site -- and we know professional writers whose work has appeared there, alongside articles written by people with strong programming skills but weak English skills -- who have been helped by Rikki and other site personnel to whip their thoughts into publishable form. All of this (aside from the All Things Open conference) goes on all year long, but Hey! If we're going to have a Most Open Month, it might as well be October, which is arguably one of the 12 most excellent months in the entire Gregorian calendar.

Rikki Endsley:
We have different themes every month in addition to doing interview
series for different events. And we were doing the
All Things Open
interview series for October because All Things Open will be held
next week in Raleigh the 19th
and 20th
of October. So in an editorial meeting months ago we were talking
about what our theme would be for the month, and somebody jokingly
mentioned ‘for most of the month’, and then we started
talking about that, and we thought about how we could use and work it
in with our interview series. We are always trying to get brand new
writers and first time contributors, and we thought that we would
kind of tie it in with that, and kind of roll out the red carpet and
really try to get a lot of new writers. And also, Jen Wike Huger came
up with the idea to do a new community column that is the My Open
Source Story column.

Slashdot:
But you’ve told me in the past that they just do not interfere
with you editorially.

Rikki:
No they really don’t. I was actually working at Linux New Media
and years ago, about five years ago, when Red
Hat launched with an
open source dotcom site, and I thought when it happened, I saw the
announcement go out, I had been keeping an eye on it all these years
and I was really impressed with how they were doing it, because back
then when I was at Linux New Media and back at SysAdmin magazine, we
didn’t really see Red Hat as being a huge community
kind of organization compared to some other open source projects. And
so I was really impressed that Red Hat was doing more community types
of projects and being more visible in their efforts, so I really kept
my eye on Opensource.com and was really impressed because also the
people who were creating this really great site—it is not a
for-profit site, that it does not have
a pay wall
or much advertising
on it. They didn’t come from a publishing background which was
also impressive to me, because I did come from a publishing
background and a journalism background and so I was ready to be
hypercritical of the site, but I was actually very impressed with it.
So one thing went to another and I eventually ended up with being
with the site, pretty recently.

Slashdot:
Alright. So tell me about the Most Open Month. How do Slashdot
readers participate?

Rikki:
Well, it is very easy. Actually you can just submit a proposal at
opensource.com/story, or you can email open@opensource.com
with an article idea, just a brief outline of what you are interested
in, and we will help people walk through it. If you don’t quite
have an idea totally fleshed out yet, but you need any help with
that, there is some kind of help with that, or suggest an outline,
and help with formatting. And then copyedit, we do have a couple of
copyeditors on staff. We don’t own articles afterwards—it
is under a Creative Commons license and so whoever contributes
articles, can then go use that article on their blog, or on their
company site, and it is has been already been edited and we’ve
already helped promote it. So it is a real cooperative relationship
that we can have with our writers then.

Slashdot:
Just make one thing clear: This is not a pay-for-writing site, is it?

Rikki:
Right. It is not. It is a non-profit site. We don’t have that
author budget. So that’s why I wouldn’t - if you are
trying to make a living as a tech journalist, and when I was a tech
journalist I did write for Opensource.com but not very often because
I had ideas
that I did want to reach the audience, and I did want to participate
in the community
and so I did write a couple of times. But if you are trying to make a
living as a journalist, you are probably not going to want to spend
your time writing for opensource.com. But like I’ve told my
journalist friends, there are a lot of stories that you want to
cover, that you can’t because you can’t sell them, and if
that’s when you want to write, we will give you that platform,
or you can help tell people in these other communities that they can
send their stories to us, and we will help them get that done.

Slashdot:
You know, it is actually more the person who is in the tech world,
the developer for instance, software developers, and their English
skills may need a little work.

Rikki:
Absolutely, yes.

Slashdot:
To be put out in public. And you are saying that that person, for
whom publications, a little publication here and there,
can be very very
career boosting.

Rikki:
Right.

Slashdot:
But you guys help make it better English.

Rikki:
Absolutely yes.
From the very beginning of my career, I have worked with non-native
English speakers, so I actually really enjoy editing those articles
because they are a little more challenging and so they are fun for
me. And then the writers
are very excited
because they get a chance to proofread it, and make sure that we
didn’t change their meanings, and then they have writing
examples that they can use now for their website, or to send to
friends or family or some other site or whatever—awesome!

Slashdot:
Awesome?

Rikki:
It is really awesome! And we have community moderators, and those are
volunteer positions, and they are hugely helpful also. It is not just
our small team in the office and you can see on the website, they are
on the team page, and there are
about 20 of them, I think, right now.

Slashdot:
Wow!

Rikki:
And they are around the world and they have different backgrounds,
different skill sets, I think at least one is retired, some are
freelancers, some work for companies, there are some developers,
there is a CEO I think, and they have been hugely helpful for us also
because they help us reach different communities that might not hear
about us or might not think of contributing. So we are just expanding
internationally a lot more, because we still have very we
still feel a lot more North American content coming in and so we are
trying to spread that out a lot more that last month we
always try to have at least 65% of the content contributed by non-Red
Hatters. And the more the better. And last month, we had 74% of the
content, it was from the community, international community, so
that’s pretty awesome.

I didn't know it, but after visiting it, I ran into the AsciiDoc article and I'm giving it a try, I guess I'll use it to write my technical documentation since OpenOffice gets on my nerves. I don't know if it's edited by the Spaghetti Monster itself, but hey, it's always good to have a channel to get to know FOSS projects. If you don't like it, don't go there, that's all. Don't be bitter, it's Friday.

Yet again, slashdot, a lot of us don't feel like spending all that time listening to people having a conversation. If you're going to show video, have it be useful video that conveys useful information that is difficult to present in any other format. A filmed interview doesn't come anywhere near qualifying under that standard. I, and many like me, don't want to sit and listen to people talking back and forth about a topic. We want a real journalist to do real work and condense the results of the interview into a useful article that quickly (and, hopefully, accurately) conveys the information.

My response to most of the comments on here.. a total fucking embarrassment.. sometimes you would wish that certain immature personalities were not on your side. Rikki Endsley, please do not judge the whole of the Open Source sector by these slashdot commentards. A long time ago slashdot was the goto place for serious technological discussion.